The elements may be, for example, male contact pins, or female elements, a well defined quantity of which may be intended for simultaneous fitting in series in a single block on a support, for example a printed circuit card.
The elements presently used are of very small size and their number may be of the order of sixty or more per strip, with pitches on the order of 2.54 mm. When it is desired to obtain, from such strips, a series comprising a given number of contact elements in a single block, they must be counted one by one up to the desired number, then the strip must be broken at the position thus reached, by a bending movement of the base, at the level of the corresponding pre-break line.
This procedure has essentially three drawbacks:
a. The operation consisting in counting the elements one by one is long and tedious, especially when it is repeated numerous times;
b. The risk of error with respect to the number of elements in the series obtained is high; and
c. It is not always easy to break the strip by bending at the chosen position.